The Tigers spent most of the last few seasons waiting for Ryan Raburn to get hot, anticipating the same late-season surge they’d always seen from the utility player, the glimpse of what might be, if he could ever put a full season together.

Tigers fans, however, grew tired of waiting for the team to stop waiting.

Those two paths intersected Tuesday, when the organization released the 31-year-old Raburn as part of a number of adjustments to the 40-man roster.

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In order to clear room to add right-handed pitchers Bruce Rondon and Melvin Mercedes, as well as shortstop Dixon Machado, to the 40-man roster, protecting them from the Dec. 6 Rule 5 Draft, the Tigers released Raburn and optioned pitcher Tyler Stohr to Triple-A Toledo.

The headline move was one much anticipated, considering the season Raburn had put together in 2012, despite all but being handed the second-base job in mid-May. A career .295 second-half hitter, the right-handed-hitting Raburn couldn’t recapture his usual late-season magic — despite a stint in Toledo to work on his swing. He finished the season hitting .171 with one home run and 12 RBI in 66 games played.

He did not make the postseason roster, despite a glaring need for a right-handed bat, after being placed on the disabled list in September.

“I don’t want to make this sound like I’m blaming him because I’m not blaming him. I misread. I thought Ryan Raburn would be that offensive piece against left-handed pitching this year. I mean, it made all the sense in the world with his home run ratio the last three years, we thought it was perfect. I thought it was perfect and so did the coaches. I just read it wrong. I just made a bad judgment,” said manager Jim Leyland, who was criticized at times for showing loyalty to the struggling Raburn, in the hopes that would instill confidence in a player who sometimes struggled with that.

“I thought, ‘Here’s the second base job, here’s a vote of confidence. Hit me 15-20 (homers), and just play pretty good second base, and that’s pretty good. And knock in 70.’ I thought that would happen. And I was wrong. And I’m not blaming him. It just didn’t happen.

“I misread it.”

Leyland’s boss, Tigers president GM Dave Dombrowski, would not discuss the team’s plans for Raburn at his season-in-review press conference two days after the end of the World Series.

Raburn was arbitration eligible, and will not reach free agency until after next season. The former fifth-round pick (2001) was on a two-year, $3.4 million deal that expired at the end of the 2012 season.

While the 22-year-old Mercedes and the 20-year-old Machado are both down-the-road prospects, spending the entirety of the 2012 season at either Low-A West Michigan or High-A Lakeland, Rondon is expected to compete for the Tigers’ closer job in 2013.

At the press conference to introduce free-agent signee Torii Hunter on Friday, Dombrowski was asked if he expected to go after a veteran closer. He did not rule it out, but said he liked the situation the team was in.

“Rondon ... right now, he’s just throwing lights-out. ... He’s playing with a good club that has the pressures on them to win, that plays in front of a full house, and if you don’t save the game there, people yell and hoot and scream and holler at you. And he’s doing the job there, and doing tremendously. This guy’s a great talent,” Dombrowski said.

“Now, you can make the argument, and understandably so, that you can break a guy in gradually. ... But he’s an unusual talent.

“I don’t want to put it on his back, and I’m not going to. But if we went into Spring Training with the guys we have right now in our bullpen, I would be happy.”